Rate My Professor John Potter

Professor John Potter holds an MBBS (1971) and a PhD (1984) from the University of Queensland. After five years practising medicine, he worked at the CSIRO Division of Human Nutrition in Adelaide from 1977 to 1986, completing his doctorate and beginning a long collaboration with Tony McMichael. He subsequently held senior positions at the Universities of Minnesota and Washington and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in Seattle, including serving as Director of its Division of Public Health Sciences. He is Professor at Massey University’s Centre for Public Health Research and Research Centre for Hauora and Health in Wellington, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the University of Washington, and Senior Advisor at FHCRC. From 2016 to 2019 he served as Chief Science Advisor to the New Zealand Ministry of Health.

Potter’s research centres on epidemiology and public health, with a focus on nutrition, other environmental and host factors, and genetics in the aetiology and pathobiology of cancer and other chronic diseases, as well as cancer screening and prevention. He chaired the international panel that produced the 1997 report Food, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective and is founding co-chair of the Asia Cohort Consortium. He has authored or co-authored more than 700 scientific papers, chapters and books, including the 2018 volume Thought for Food, and maintains a Scopus h-index of 125. International honours include the Gopalan Oration Gold Medal (1996) and the IARC Medal of Honour (2012). He has led or contributed to multiple Health Research Council-funded projects, including a randomised trial of HPV self-sampling to improve cervical-cancer screening participation among Māori, Pacific and Asian women.